Quiet galaxy - the decline of GalNet

aRJay

aRJay
Ian Doncaster said:
This I think will be the trickiest thing for Frontier to handle with Powerplay 2: does it interact with anything else like Galnet?

If it doesn't interact (as Powerplay 1 doesn't) then you have weirdness where "Denton Patreus, Admiral of the Imperial Fleet" and "Denton Patreus, Powerplay Figurehead" are two completely separate people whose actions, successes, failures, etc. are all completely unrelated. Admiral Patreus can hypothetically be taking some criticism in the Senate for a recent failure on Galnet at the same time as Power Patreus has just captured Sol.

If it does interact then the situation is - as the Thargoid war has shown - potentially even worse. Denton Patreus clearly can't be allowed to capture Sol (or indeed any other half-way important Federal system) but if the players don't stop him does that mean Frontier have to instead? Their various interventions to deal with players being too fast / too slow in the Thargoid war haven't been very popular; dropping something similarly arbitrary to keep the plot on track into a long-running player-versus-player conflict would be extremely unpopular.
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From experiences when I was still working I wonder if they are the same people, in an office of around a dozen we had two people who had identical names and in another there was a Dr <insert initial and Irish sounding name> working in a major Belfast hospital there was a Dr with the same initials and one of the external phone numbers for a phone in our Dr‘s section differed from the hospital’s by just a transposition of digits in the exchange prefix.
 

Rainbro

Rainbro
Ozric said:
You mean the point in time that coincided with more of the team being moved off of the Live Galaxy to work on Odyssey for the couple of years prior to it's release? And then once it was almost ready to be release it starting back up a few months before to set the narrative up?
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I don't think the timescales quite work there. On the mechanical side, sure, Odyssey would have taken the bulk of the devs, but the writers, several years ahead of time even without delays? It's not like Odyssey was reliant on the resulting narrative when it did return either, if that was the only factor I'd expect them to have just kept it ticking along as it was, rather than stopping and starting.

Either way, neither of us know their true reasoning or staff allocations. My overall point changes little if Frontier decided to shelve GalNet previously because of Odyssey rather than anything else.

Now we have a serious reduction in staff once again, though for different reasons and not as extreme. We have passed Update 18 which is the last main thing most of the departed worked on, and once again there is a decline in Galnet. The next big push is for Update 19, and that will definitely need some flavour through Galnet.

As much as it is indeed a shame, I think it's pretty obvious why things are like they are.
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And this is why I don't think the reasoning for the last shutdown is as relevant. I think you're suggesting that if the previous shutdown was for Odyssey, then it would always have been temporary, and that this decline also matches up to Update 19. I'm not convinced, though. The current decline started nearly two years ago - it's about plausible that Frontier would pull writers away that far in advance for a major expansion like Odyssey, but Update 19? That would require them to be remarkably confident about the contents of that update at a time when they weren't even saying which feature would be reworked, and talking about it seperately from narrative in their plans. And obviously, it didn't play out that way.

And of course, this time it's not people being reassigned. If Update 19 was such a major overhaul as to require narrative support being pulled away at least a year in advance, then it'd be a bit weird to go the opposite direction and reduce the number of writers relatively close to its release.

You're correct in that Powerplay 2.0 would massively benefit from narrative support. That just doesn't necessarily mean it's going to get it, as Powerplay 1.0 can attest to.
 

IstvaanDCIV

IstvaanDCIV
While I will miss the narrative additions brought by a more active GalNet, if it does go quiet for an extended time and if nothing else major is happening in the bubble like the current Thargoid War, then I do have plans that would fit perfectly into such a quiescent period. Like that extended carrier-based expedition I've been planning, or getting seriously involved in BGS manipulation.
 

Rubbernuke

Rubbernuke
Ian Doncaster said:
This I think will be the trickiest thing for Frontier to handle with Powerplay 2: does it interact with anything else like Galnet?

If it doesn't interact (as Powerplay 1 doesn't) then you have weirdness where "Denton Patreus, Admiral of the Imperial Fleet" and "Denton Patreus, Powerplay Figurehead" are two completely separate people whose actions, successes, failures, etc. are all completely unrelated. Admiral Patreus can hypothetically be taking some criticism in the Senate for a recent failure on Galnet at the same time as Power Patreus has just captured Sol.

If it does interact then the situation is - as the Thargoid war has shown - potentially even worse. Denton Patreus clearly can't be allowed to capture Sol (or indeed any other half-way important Federal system) but if the players don't stop him does that mean Frontier have to instead? Their various interventions to deal with players being too fast / too slow in the Thargoid war haven't been very popular; dropping something similarly arbitrary to keep the plot on track into a long-running player-versus-player conflict would be extremely unpopular.
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The other possibility is that players accept the BGS / PP events and invent their own stories, Galnet stays quiet on them but you instead have messages of congratulation or defeat direct to pledges that have slight power flavour. You could also build proc gen reports based on hooks in the BGS for local reporting for local news.
 

Rebel Yell

Rebel Yell
Rubbernuke said:
The other possibility is that players accept the BGS / PP events and invent their own stories, Galnet stays quiet on them but you instead have messages of congratulation or defeat direct to pledges that have slight power flavour. You could also build proc gen reports based on hooks in the BGS for local reporting for local news.
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...just remember that powerplay as we know right now could be gone in the wind forever within few months. :D
 

Cmdr. Numa

Cmdr. Numa
Rebel Yell said:
...just remember that powerplay as we know right now could be gone in the wind forever within few months. :D
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What FDEV have shown so far and what I've learned from their releases in the past is that the new content is probably tacked onto the existing stuff. A total revamp is unlikely and IMO at least currently out of scope of the possibilities that FDEV in their current emergency state have.
 

Ozric

Volunteer Moderator
Ozric
Rainbro said:
And this is why I don't think the reasoning for the last shutdown is as relevant. I think you're suggesting that if the previous shutdown was for Odyssey, then it would always have been temporary, and that this decline also matches up to Update 19. I'm not convinced, though. The current decline started nearly two years ago - it's about plausible that Frontier would pull writers away that far in advance for a major expansion like Odyssey, but Update 19? That would require them to be remarkably confident about the contents of that update at a time when they weren't even saying which feature would be reworked, and talking about it seperately from narrative in their plans. And obviously, it didn't play out that way.

And of course, this time it's not people being reassigned. If Update 19 was such a major overhaul as to require narrative support being pulled away at least a year in advance, then it'd be a bit weird to go the opposite direction and reduce the number of writers relatively close to its release.

You're correct in that Powerplay 2.0 would massively benefit from narrative support. That just doesn't necessarily mean it's going to get it, as Powerplay 1.0 can attest to.
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No I'm not suggesting there's an exact parallel, I certainly wasn't thinking in terms of timescales. I'm merely saying that as Galnet has been shelved in the past when the team has had to focus on an upcoming release, it seems likely to me that if there is a pressure crunch on, then Galnet will be one of the first to go. With Ben and Hannah both leaving I'm not sure what size the current narrative team is, but it seems reasonable to me that if it exists it will be very small, and so their efforts would be better directed towards content coming around the main update 19 narrative. We know the two of them had written content for Update 18, we also know that since they have left there has been no other non update 18 related articles.

I am one who was very much in support of fluff articles being in Galnet, but then I also used to enjoy the Freelance articles back in the day (though I understand why they were stopped). But I don't see any way that there will be a big upswing in the amount of Galnet articles in general until the situation in the company has first stabilised, then turned around.
 

Half-Lock

Half-Lock
Ozric said:
She is, like all Volunteer Moderators, a volunteer. The clue is in the name badge
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I didn’t, 👀, technically say she was anything other than someone that got promoted- now being on the Frontier live stream, but that’s a fair piece of information to share, to make clear of the realities the development team’s working with.
I also did not know that she had a badge.
 

zimms

zimms
Half-Lock said:
I didn’t, 👀, technically say she was anything other than someone that got promoted- now being on the Frontier live stream, but that’s a fair piece of information to share, to make clear of the realities the development team’s working with.
I also did not know that she had a badge.
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Since you mentioned live streams, could it be you are confusing volunteer moderator Heather with former community manager Hollie?
 

hems303

hems303
Rise, fall & rise again of GalNet being what it is, rumors abound in the Game Developer 'industry'.. as to how developers are headlong into figuring how to inject (or even hand over) game 'narrative' to current level Artificial Intelligence (AI).... my guess is FDev are also looking into leveraging latest AI into their titles..... GalNet could be a paradise for AI with all the depths of data the core game produces, and that could be speedily wrangled by AI into a believable narrative 'stream' consumed by commanders via GalNet. 🤔

www.bbc.co.uk

AI will 'lead to more games being made and more jobs'

Games have been using forms of AI for years, but what does the industry think of the latest tech?
www.bbc.co.uk
 
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Half-Lock

Half-Lock
zimms said:
Since you mentioned live streams, could it be you are confusing volunteer moderator Heather with former community manager Hollie?
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Isn’t Heather this one?
IMG_0360.jpeg

Are there more people than one person with the same name and semi-similar roles?
 

Half-Lock

Half-Lock
Cmdr. Numa said:
All the side storylines hanging in the air. But I guess twitter X and the ingame mailbox are the new story devices.
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I actually kind of like that they’re using the in-game mailbox to deliver narrative updates.
It’s a nice reminder about how the PF and EPF are secretive organizations- which, by the way, I feel like the narrative team have yet to exploit for PP (Empire, Federation, etc as opposed to E/PF) purposes
 
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